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“... and difficulty would be all – the real lyricism of the thing can only flower on the page. Joan Wyndham, on the other hand, another diarist and contemporary of Pym who conveys the same inimitable sense of being a silly girl, or rather of wanting to be a silly girl, as the diary self, also likes to note the solid satisfactions of sex, how it took place in a ...”

“... castes based on skin colour. Back in London, Lord Sydney was replaced as home secretary by William Wyndham Grenville, Pitt’s cousin and his ally in managing colonial policy more directly by means of the prime minister’s influence over matters of tax and war. For Grenville, the Bay of Honduras settlement was first and foremost a valuable source of ...”

“... Lowthian Bell, and the surviving though damaged Clouds for the socialites Percy and Madeline Wyndham. Clouds, destined for house-parties, was the costliest thing Webb built and, Kirk says, ‘probably the only 19th-century house of its size in which every detail, whether inside or out, important or insignificant, was designed by one man’. Having burned ...”

“... were available from a bequest made especially for this purpose by the great portrait sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey, who is described by Spalding very unfairly as an artist ‘who personified just the kind of professional success that the RA hoped to promote’. Few people were happy with the way the bequest was spent and it is right to echo complaints made at ...”

“... were united in their enthusiastic disgust over his bad taste. It is unusual, for instance, to find Wyndham Lewis (for whom Murry was merely a ‘crafty gushbag’) so overtaken in the matter of invective. Virginia Woolf, who saw in him a posturing little man with bad teeth and a profoundly perverted nature, wrote: ‘he has been rolling in dung, and smells ...”

“... squaddies’. Tin-hatted and masked and tightly trousered, they were part Bellmer, part Uccello. Wyndham Lewis confessed to fraternal feelings for Burra and his troops. ‘When I see the purple bottoms of his military ruffians in athletic action against other stout though fiendish fellows, I recognise a brother.’ The war brought Burra to the boil, whether ...”

“... beauty’. His pictures still sold. The Tate bought one from Stephen Spender in 1957, but Wyndham Lewis made a fair point in calling Craxton’s work from this time ‘a prettily tinted cocktail that … does not quite kick hard enough’. In 1954 it was Nicholson, Freud and Bacon who represented Britain at the Venice Biennale.Craxton’s​ life in ...”

“... a few rounds with the author of Dubliners, or even that the author of ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ could have mixed it for a while with Mr Tolstoy. Two of these biographies are concerned only with the youthful Hemingway as the sort of person who could become the sort of person he later became; they stop at pretty well the same point, when ...”

“... such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain with private characters who, if not invented, were surely concealed like the author himself ...”

“... and essayist, he gave respect and appreciation to such various talents as Ian Fleming and Dick Francis, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell – all British writers. It is hard to believe that he hadn’t read, at some time between its first British publication in 1943 and the writing of ‘High Windows’ in 1967, a book by the writer regarded by many as the ...”

“... Dugouts!’) I’ve got a whole shelf on war artists: C.R.W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, William Roberts, Wyndham Lewis, and the skullishly named Muirhead Bone. I’ve got books about Fabian Ware and the founding of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I’ve a 1920 Blue Guide to Belgium and the Western Front and a Michelin Somme guide from 1922 – both published ...”

“... doing ‘machine work’. When Iseult began to share a flat with the highly unsuitable mistress of Wyndham Lewis, both Yeats and George arrived from Dublin and swooped on the place, as though they were her parents, and removed Iseult, Josephine her maid, her cat, her birds and her furniture to more decent quarters. George was less than two years older than ...”